In May 1979, Myrtle Cummings, chairwoman of the flower committee at First Baptist Church, Pelham, and a pillar of the church, said she wasn’t going to love the new preacher. She wasn’t going to love him or get close to him or his family.
Cummings was 80 years old — she told herself she just couldn’t take another heartbreak. She just knew there would come a time when he would box up his commentaries, concordances and family and go off to some other church just like the rest of them.
Mike Shaw chuckled at the memory.
“She didn’t say it directly to me,” he said. “I heard it through the grapevine.”
Before passing away in 1988, Cummings got to see nine years of how wonderfully wrong she had been.
On May 17, 2009, Shaw celebrated 30 years as pastor of the Shelby Baptist Association church with a lineup of Baptist leaders and city and state officials. Don Murphy, Pelham’s mayor, was in attendance, as was Sen. Hank Erwin, bearing resolutions of commendation from Gov. Bob Riley.
Shaw, a 1970 graduate of Samford University in Birmingham, sat there, humbled. As a young preacher fresh out of seminary in New Orleans, he would have these fantastic daydreams of one day taking over for Pastor W.A. Criswell at First Baptist Church, Dallas.
But as Shaw looked around the sanctuary that Sunday morning and the choir started performing his favorite song, “Pentecostal Fire Is Falling” (as it does every year on his anniversary), he knew he wouldn’t have traded what he saw for anything.
And it only helped matters that the song had been reworded to be “Walker County Corn Is Calling.”
Shaw accepted Christ during a church camp get-together in a Walker County cornfield when he was 16, and now he is the pastor of people special enough to remember that and what it’s always meant to him.
“I loved that,” Shaw said of the song. “That’s my testimony. I was a lost church member for seven years. I joined the church when I was 9, but nobody told me how to be saved.”
He’s made preventing that from happening to someone else a signature concern of his career at First, Pelham.
“Regardless of where they’ve been, I want them counseled,” Shaw said of new church members. “I don’t just want them to fill out a card; I want to make sure they have an experience with Jesus Christ.”
That is what makes him so effective, so beloved, said Pat MacKay, Shaw’s ministry assistant for nearly 13 years.
“It’s very unusual to have a pastor who is a great pastor and a great preacher,” she said. “Usually you get one or the other but we have both.”
Shaw’s wife, Mary, who has been behind the church’s piano nearly as long as her husband has been behind its pulpit, agreed.
“I’m his best critic but I never get tired of hearing him preach,” she said. “Every message of his is wonderful, but the beautiful thing is that as well as being a wonderful preacher, he’s a pastor and he knows these people. They trust him.”
They’ve trusted Shaw from the beginning. People who trusted him to baptize their children are now watching him baptize their grandchildren.
As for their great-grandchildren? That will be up to God, he said.
“I promised these folks that since the children of Israel only had to put up with Moses for 40 years, that if my health and mind holds and I make it to 40, they’ll get a new preacher,” Shaw said. “Of course, whether my mind holds up is questionable. It’s never been anything to brag about. I’m sure some folks were questioning it in 1979.”
Few are questioning it now. In addition to his duties at First, Pelham, Shaw has served on the board of directors for The Alabama Baptist — he was chairman when Editor Hudson Baggett passed away in 1994 — as well as on the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions. He currently serves as first vice president of the Alabama Baptist State Convention.
As for his future at First, Pelham? Shaw said he wants to stay.
“I’m ready to stay but I’m willing to go (to another church) if the Lord called me,” Shaw said.
Thirty years ago, Cummings decided she couldn’t have asked for anything more than that. After unpacking his commentaries and concordances, young Shaw decided to pay her a visit.
He could hear a Jimmie Davis record on in the background — maybe it was “You Are My Sunshine.” He knocked on her door.
“Mrs. Cummings,” he said, “somebody told me you’re not going to love me.”
“Oh,” she said. “Those people at church are always gossiping.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m glad it’s not true.”
“No,” she said. “I said it.”
Then Cummings started crying. She told Shaw why. She wanted to love him, get to know him and let him be pastor of the church that was her heart and soul. But the thought of having to start all over again, the thought of him leaving … well, by the end, they were both crying.
Cummings finally looked up.
“Brother Mike,” she said, “would you and your family like to come over to dinner tomorrow night?”
Share with others: